the racialisation of jews in israeli documentary photography
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [University of Texas Libraries]On: 25 November 2014, At: 15:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Intercultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjis20
The Racialisation of Jews in IsraeliDocumentary PhotographyNoa HazanPublished online: 19 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: Noa Hazan (2010) The Racialisation of Jews in Israeli DocumentaryPhotography, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31:2, 161-182, DOI: 10.1080/07256860903579079
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256860903579079
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
The Racialisation of Jews in IsraeliDocumentary PhotographyNoa Hazan
This paper explores the visual codes for representing Jews of different origins in Israeli
documentary photography in light of the role of photography in constructing the identity
of Jewish communities in Israeli space and considering the lack of race discourse in Israel.
It reviews the field of Israeli photography while analysing photographs taken in Israel in
the 1950s and 1960s and then shows how racist visual codes are replicated in the present.
The author argues that, although the concept of race as such does not come up in
everyday and academic verbal discourse in Israel, and despite the fact that the State of
Israel stresses racial equality in its Declaration of Independence, Israeli photography
constructs visual codes that enable a visualisation of race. The discussion points out the
dialectic dimension of race in photographs, as both an invented and a camouflaged
element which should be attended to, but also as one which should be dismantled and
presented as fraudulent and empty. This analysis takes place at the junction of
photography, race and nationality in Israeli society.
Keywords: Documentary Photography; Immigration; Ingathering of the Exiles; Melting-
Pot Ideal; Multiculturalism; Politics of Identities; Race; Racialisation
Two women and a girl stand in front of a glass display box in a museum, their eyes
fixed on the mannequin behind the glass (Figure 1). The mannequin, of a Yemenite
bride, is adorned with jewellery and her ceremonial costume reveals only her dark
face. Despite the fact that in the museum the mannequin is positioned behind glass,
the camera is directed at the group of observers, frames them behind the glass and
inverts the object of sight. This inversion captures the viewers and their curious looks,
transforming them into the subject of the photograph. As they respond to the
museum’s display system, studying the Yemenite bride, the camera angle rearranges
Noa Hazan is a PhD student in the Department of Hermeneutics and Culture at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Her
research deals with the representation of race in Israeli institutional and private photography. She lives and works
in Tel Aviv. Correspondence to: Noa Hazan, 11 Modigliani St., Tel Aviv, Israel. Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0725-6868 print/ISSN 1469-9540 online/10/020161-22
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/07256860903579079
Journal of Intercultural Studies
Vol. 31, No. 2, April 2010, pp. 161�182
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
the relationship between the gazes. My gaze is transferred to theirs, turning them into
the object of my study � I am looking at them looking at her.
The photograph appeared in one of the numerous photography albums published
in Israel since the 1950s. This particular one included photos from the Middle East
Archives and the Government Press Office. Nostalgic, historical photography books
are published to this day and are sold in bookstores every year, particularly around
Independence Day. The photos in these albums present Jews of various diasporas in
an array of everyday life situations, combining history and actuality.
What do these photographs aim to manifest? What do they wish to conceal? What
are the conventional visual codes they reveal? How do these visual codes serve racist
and discriminatory ideas? And how does a renewed viewing of the photographs
challenge such ideas? These are the questions underlying the present analysis.
First, the discussion focuses on race discourse in Israel and depicts the various shades
of Israel’s Jewish population. It then addresses the role of photography in constructing
the identity of Jewish communities in Israeli space and reviews the field of Israeli
photography while analysing photographs taken in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.
The latter part of the paper features a current photograph, taken in 2007, and
shows how racist visual codes of the 1950s and 1960s are replicated in the present.
Figure 1 Unknown photographer. ‘‘Treasures of the Past’’, Israel Today and Yesterday,
Israel, 1965.
162 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
The analysis takes place at the junction of photography, race and nationality in Israeli
society.
The paper argues that, although the concept of race as such does not come up in
everyday and academic verbal discourse in Israel, and despite the fact that the State of
Israel stresses racial equality in its Declaration of Independence, Israeli photography
constructs visual codes that enable a visualisation of race. Racial visual codes have
been moulded by hegemonic Israeli photographers correlating with different periods
and places.
Race in Colloquial and Academic Discourse in Israel
Despite the fact that prior to the Second World War Zionist scientists, philosophers
and later, prominent statesmen, debated the issue of Jewish race in its theoretical and
practical contexts (Hart 160), following the Nazi use of and strict adherence to race
theory, the term race disappeared entirely from Israeli research. Race was then
channelled to more mobile categories such as ethnic groups, countries of origin and class.
Yet even without explicit biological�genetic terminology, the majority of Israeli
researchers in sociology, cognition and medicine explained the gaps dividing the
various populations in Israel in biological terms and claimed that these were
irreconcilable (Shenhav and Yona). This kind of research was conducted especially
during the first two decades of the state and particularly expressed the differences
between established European Jews vs. Jewish immigrants of Asian and African
countries. In recent years as well, in spite of a growing awareness among scholars of
racist ideas disguised in casual and academic discourse in Israel, researchers have
continued to avoid using the outright term ‘race’, and still examine the mosaic of
Israeli identities vis-a-vis the same softer and mobile categories.1 Explicit discussion
of race is also missing from the two main visual projects that have dealt with
representations of Israeli politics of identity: Eastern Appearance/Mother Tongue: A
Present that Stirs in the Thickets of its Arab Past (edited by Nizri) including personal
experiences of different artists pertaining to the visibility of ethnicity in the Israeli
context, and the group exhibition The White Sport: Myths of Race, shown at Minshar
Gallery in Tel Aviv in May 2008.2
In the absence of any discussion of visual representations of race in Israel, the paper
focuses on the strategies of racial representation in Israeli photography, attempting to
lay the foundations for a discussion of the visibility of race and the configurations of
racial imagery in Israel.
The Shades of Israel’s Jewish Population
By its very definition as a national home for all Jews the world over, the State of Israel
embraces Jews of different cultures and lands. In spite of their many origins, Jews who
immigrated to Israel are invariably defined as belonging to either one of the two main
groups: Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. The term Mizrahi (‘Eastern’) in its Israeli context,
Journal of Intercultural Studies 163
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
refers to Jews who emigrated from Asian and African Arab countries � Yemen, Iraq,
Iran, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. This term constitutes a cultural rather
than geographical marker, given that Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are also known as
the Maghreb (Arab term for ‘lands of the west’), located in north-west Africa, and are
not east of Israel. The Eastern Jews, historically spared pogroms of the kind and
magnitude suffered by the Jews of Europe, preserved their religious customs while
absorbing influences from Arab culture and ways of life. Other names for the Eastern
Jews include Oriental Jews, Sfaradim (Spanish) and recently also Arab Jews (Shenhav).
Unlike Eastern Jews, in Israel the Jews from Europe (mostly from former USSR)
and North America are called Ashkenazi (although the name Ashkenaz originated in
the Middle Ages and referred only to the German diaspora). The Zionist movement
was founded by Ashkenazi Jews who were also the first to arrive in Israel in the early
waves of immigration (towards the end of the nineteenth century), purchasing land
and settling on it. They came mainly from Lithuania, Romania, Russia and Poland.
The ‘Eastern’ (Mizrahi) Jews who came to the country were considered immigrants
from the ‘third world’, while the Western (European, Ashkenazi) Jews (supposedly)
considered themselves as having originated from the ‘first world’. In fact, however,
many lands considered ‘Eastern’ were far more advanced in their modernisation
processes than certain European countries that, in the Israeli context, are considered
‘Ashkenazi’. In spite of its arbitrariness, this division had a polarising effect on the
status of immigrants from these countries vis-a-vis the establishment institutions,
and on their settlement conditions in Israel.
Although prior to the establishment of the Israeli state most Jewish residents of
Palestine were of Ashkenazi descent (76 per cent in 1948), following the massive
immigration waves of Jews from Arab countries in the 1950s and early 1960s, the
Eastern Jews became the majority of Jewish citizens of Israel (48 per cent in 1970)3
(Sicron Demography 60). However, this had little or no impact on the Israeli
establishment, which considered itself Western, enlightened and modern while
distancing itself from its Arab surroundings. The establishment and its institutions
sought to create new, uniform Israeli citizens, identical in appearance and culture,
even at the price of cultural oppression and exclusion of the majority of the country’s
citizens. This ‘melting-pot’ ethos has gone hand-in-hand with the ‘ingathering of the
exiles’ idea ever since the birth of the state. In its Israeli context, the term ‘melting
pot’ is closely linked with official policy (starting under David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s
first prime minister and head of its government, 1948�63) of eliminating the
differences between immigrant Jews from different countries, in order to create a
homogenous Israeli culture. The two official bodies to implement this policy were the
IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) and the education system. Based on this policy, Jews
were required to relinquish their own cultures and customs, and to adopt ‘Israeli’
customs in their stead that would be apparent in their dress, language, musical tastes,
food and ceremonies. The new Zionist�Israeli culture suited only a minority of the
immigrant population that identified with the ruling establishment. Most immigrants
164 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
had to give up their own customs and take on a culture whose language and values
were totally alien to them.
The manifestation par excellence of this new Israeli culture is the idea of the Sabra.
Named after the sweet and thorny fruit of the prickly-pear cactus, Sabra is a slang
nickname depicting a Jew born in Israel. The stereotype Sabras were characterised
visually by their upright, muscular body, bronzed by physical labour in the sun,
usually wearing shorts, a plain buttoned shirt and a cloth cap � the garb uniformly
worn by boys and girls alike. It was the antithesis of the heavy, confining dress of their
antecedents, Jews of the ‘old days’ who had lived in the shtetls (small Jewish towns) of
Europe as small traders and religious scholars. The garb expressed the new Jew’s
ideological transition from urban to agrarian life. While the ‘old Jew’ spoke European
languages or a heavily accented Hebrew, for the Sabra Hebrew was a native tongue.
Unlike the ‘old Jew’ who never acted in his own defence, the Sabra fought in
underground resistance movements and in the army. Although the new, Israel-born
descendants of Eastern immigrants are also included in this definition, the
appellation was used mostly for girls and boys of European origins who lived in
the moshavim and kibbutzim. Nor did this definition include the Palestinian Arabs
who lived in the State of Israel, however native.
Today, in the attempts to construct a multicultural Israeli society, many Israeli
intellectuals propose replacing the melting-pot model with a pluralistic conception
that supports intercultural tolerance and respect for customs and the unique nature
of various groups, but these ideas have not yet been implemented through
government policy.
The Construction of ‘Israeliness’ in Photography
With the founding of the Zionist movement, photography was recruited to meet the
needs of national revival in Palestine. In the 1930s, photographers arrived in the
region on behalf of the (Zionist) United Israel Appeal and the Jewish National Fund,
photographing the newly emerging Hebrew lifestyle to raise funds from Jews the
world over. These photographs were commissioned products in the service of Zionist
propaganda and lacked any personal or artistic dimensions of the photographers
themselves. Even after the founding of the State, as the need arose to re-shape Jewish
immigrants as one uniform people, photography was recruited to construct a visual
Israeli entity � shaping its collective memory by creating a visual national mythology.
Until the 1970s, Israeli photography was subject to political or military censorship
and its missions adhered to the State’s official goals: to wrap all the many, very
different immigrants around a uniform national myth (Perez 8�11).
Documentary photographs published in the establishment newspapers and albums
contained iconographic codes fixed in the collective consciousness which enabled
Israeli viewers to read the set of meanings embedded in them, understand and
identify with them � even though the messages they bore discriminated against large
groups within the Israeli collective, especially Eastern Jews.4 These photographs were
Journal of Intercultural Studies 165
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
active agents of the establishment’s control apparatuses, and active generators of
Israeli lore, not merely evidence and documentation of it. In most cases, visual codes
in Israeli documentary photography served to define the new Israeli through
negation, antipodal both to the Arab, to the Oriental and to the European (Rogoff).
As the physical conditions for disseminating documentary photographs were
nearly all controlled by the ruling power and its various institutions, leaving no room
for unique points of view or critical views of the photographers themselves, one
might in fact say that documentary photography nearly always served to reinforce
established hegemonic positions. In such a state of affairs, the documentary
photographs must be regarded not as a reflection of any photographer’s personal
stand, but rather as expressing the general atmosphere prevailing in the circles of
power that controlled advocacy, information and its dissemination.
After photography � as a medium � has served Israeli propaganda for many years
by providing it with a rigid code of appearance enforcing a homogenic perspective, I
seek to employ the very same medium to establish a renewed perspective on these
visual remnants, and show that their meaning is not as stable and fixed as might be
expected. As proposed by Knowles, I will relate to photography as a conscious social
and national practice, and to what can be seen in photographs as a direct expression
of social and national structures in which both the viewers and the photographs are
situated in a complex network of connections (512).
The Study
Based on the above-mentioned discussion, the aim of this paper is to indicate visual
codes of racial otherness in Israeli documentary photographs, to understand the
meaning of these codes, and eventually to point out their reversibility and the fact
that they may be subjected to different readings. Pointing out the dialectic dimension
of race in photographs will relate to it as both an invented and a camouflaged element
which should be attended to but also as one which should be dismantled and
presented as fraudulent and empty (Guillaumin 99; Hardimon 437).
The present discussion relates to race as an ongoing and evolving concept and is
based on the idea that the primary role of contemporary theoretical discourse on race
is not to criticise the concept of race as a natural category, but rather to direct
attention to the persistent nature and variable meanings of the concept of race, and
point out its illusiveness (Jackson 394�95). This role entails voicing objection to the
claims regarding the death of active racism and its substitution with seemingly
objective categories such as ethnicity, nationality or class.5
I return to the photographs at hand: the Yemenite woman’s body in Figure 1,
‘‘Treasures of the Past’’, has been substituted by a hollow plastic doll, framed behind a
glass display. The mannequin, identified by the Western consumer world, introduces
the observing women to the Yemenite bride who, in the Israeli context, is identified as
Mizrahi, ‘Eastern’.
166 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
She is served up in an easily digestible manner, isolated from her surroundings,
her jewellery arranged boutique-like. This mode of representation objectifies her
figure, preventing the observer from regarding her as anything but an old
ethnographic exhibit (Rosler). The national museum’s romanticisation of Eastern
culture � represented here by the Yemenite bride-mannequin � expresses the Israeli
establishment’s position regarding this culture. The exhibit location in the Ethno-
graphic Department and the photograph name, ‘‘Treasures of the Past’’, cloak the
culture of the Eastern Jews with irrelevance regarding the present, and position it in
the past. This disregards the everyday existence of the culture of Eastern Jews,
obscuring the fact that many Jewish women today still celebrate their wedding
ceremonies dressed in a similar costume, as practised in my family.
In a state whose culture idolises the new and modern, fixing the Eastern woman in
a perpetual past defines the Eastern-Yemenite woman as the ‘permanent other’ to
Israeliness. This definition is not incidental and constitutes a constant display pattern
of the Eastern woman in photographs from the 1950s and 1960s.
Figure 2, ‘‘On the Way to Class’’, is another example fitting this definition. Two
women appear in a photograph taken in 1965 and shown as part of a collage on the
back cover of a historical photo album published in 1966. The older woman is
identified as Mizrahi by her head cover and dress, and the younger � a soldier of the
IDF, in those years identified with the Ashkenazi establishment. The photograph
presences the ambivalence with which Israeli society � embodied by the soldier � relates
Figure 2 Unknown photographer. ‘‘On the Way to Class’’, Israel Today and Yesterday,
Israel, 1965.
Journal of Intercultural Studies 167
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
to the Eastern woman. On the one hand, it emphasises the bond between the two
women, designated by their hand contact and the smiles on their faces, as if sharing a
secret, as well as the resemblance in the direction of their gaze, their hair, the length of
their sleeves, skirts and exposed feet. The composition, however, emphasises the
hierarchy of the two women in their height difference, and in the younger woman’s
stepping ahead of the older, a gap interpreting their delicate hand-holding as a helpful
forward-pull. In the Israeli context, this gesture hints at the interference of the state in
the lives of the Eastern immigrants, through women in the roles of nurses, social
workers or soldier-teachers who have served as agents of the establishment, and whose
role it has been to transform life habits of the Eastern immigrants especially in the
realms of education and hygiene (Hirsch). Presenting the Eastern woman as belonging
to the old world of yesterday, and the Sabra soldier to the new present, is reinforced by
the title. The Eastern woman with her cultural features is seen in this case as well, as
foreign, ‘other’.
The average Israeli viewer would rate the women in the photographs simulta-
neously according to two contradictory values: the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ that sees
all Jewish immigrants as legitimate and ultimate Israeli citizens, and the ideal Israeli-
Sabra, the antithesis of the immigrant.
Both pairs of photographs (Figures 3(a) and (b)) shown here correspond to the
same racial perception of exclusion. They were paired on the same page in the
original. In the first pair of photographs (Figures 3(a)), published in The Children of
Israel, women are seen carrying their babies. In the picture on the right, a woman in a
button-down dress holds a blond baby in her arms and smiles to the camera. The
baby too directs his gaze towards the camera. The sunlight on their faces and the
shade of trees in the background indicate that they are outdoors. The lack of
Figure 3(a) Unknown photographer. No name, The Children of Israel, Israel, 1950.
168 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
resemblance between woman and baby � obvious in the colour of their hair and their
facial features � hints that the woman is not the baby’s mother but a professional
caregiver. Professionals were responsible for childcare on Israel’s kibbutzim and this
was considered a positive, innovative educational approach. Raising infants and
children in the open air and sunlight was another Israeli educational ideal � thus the
figures in the photograph actually embody the Israeli ideal for childcare at its best.
Their opposite is presented in the photograph on the left � a kerchiefed woman sits
on a bed indoors. Her hair hides her face from the camera, her breast is bare and she
nurses a baby sitting in her lap. Her dress and head kerchief identify her as an Eastern
immigrant. Unlike the strong, confident grip of the woman in the other photograph,
the baby in this picture seems to hang from the mother’s breast, her hands holding
him limply. The identical dark print that wraps the woman’s head and the baby
makes them appear as one connected entity. Likewise, the resemblance between the
woman and the baby and the act of nursing hint that she is his mother. In view of the
hegemonic ‘kibbutz’ educational approach of separating babies from their mothers,
the seated woman is constructed as alien to the Israeli ideal. Her kerchief, dress and
bare breast assign her an oriental look, which in the Israeli context is identified as
negative.
The second pair of photographs (Figure 3(b)) was taken in the 1950s and published
in 1997 in one of the historical photo albums issued yearly to mark Israel’s
Independence Day. The photographs show women laundering. In the top photograph,
Figure 3(b) Unknown photographer. ‘‘Laundry’’, around 1950, Those Were the Days:
Israel, the Early Years, Israel, 1997.
Journal of Intercultural Studies 169
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
a woman in a pressed white-print button-down blouse faces a row of square sinks with
running water in a structure that seems made for cleanliness and laundry. Her back
erect, her hands skilfully holding the laundered cloth, her eyes focused on her action,
she does not look at the photographer. In the bottom photograph, three women in
dark caftans (Arab dress) revealing their Eastern origin squat on the ground facing tins
that serve as makeshift laundry basins. The washboard which the woman on the right
holds between her legs also indicates origins in some African or Asian country. On the
left margin of the photograph, behind the back of the woman on the left, a hint of a
low pipe-faucet is the only source of running water. They are situated at the opening of
a muddy, unpaved passage between two structures seen in the background. Their
laundry lies on the wet floor at their feet. In both photographs, an open composition
is halved by a diagonal line from top to bottom, creating depth and continuity, and in
both, the women are situated in the bottom left-hand corner. These similarities
emphasise the sharp differences between the women photographed. The dishevelled
scene shown in the bottom photograph, the dark clothing of all three women, their
squatting outdoors in an undefined space and the laundry lying on the ground, all
constitute a blatant contrast to the order that prevails in the top photograph, the built-
in basins, the erect posture and the sparkling shirt worn by the woman photographed.
Even if taken in the same year, a mere few kilometres apart, the photographs create a
total separation between the women based on the signifier of hygiene that is one of the
main justification apparatuses of racial segregation in Israel. As an alternative to racial
hierarchy, hygiene signifies the degree to which the women are civilised, and attests to
their inner essence. In this justifying sense, their squatting while laundering is
perceived as unhygienic behaviour that indicates faulty morals, lack of culture and a
generally degenerate state. Hygiene discourse that pretends to be scientific and
objective has proven effective in this case to naturalise political and social distinctions
of the photographed women, and to justify segregative racist practices par excellence
imposed upon them, as seen in the first photograph. The marked difference between
the improvised basins on the ground and the built basins also expresses a racist
approach that connects technological development and racial supremacy (Fusco 33).
Figures 1, 2 and 3(a) and (b) represent the Eastern woman as failing to adjust to
modern reality in Israel. For emphasis, she appears beside Israeli-born women who
represent modernity and progress; the juxtaposition of these women, Eastern and
Sabra, represents the viewpoint that regards Eastern and Western entities as
supporting and reflecting each other and renders the Eastern woman as the
counter-image of the Sabra (Said 14).
These photographs emphasise the marks of otherness borne by the Eastern woman’s
body, manifested by the colour of her skin, her attire and the way she goes about her
daily tasks. Seemingly, these photographs do not deal with biological heredity, but
repeatedly emphasise the rigidity of the cultural gap present in every domain of life.
Yet precisely this rigidity enables the transference of cultural and spiritual heritage
features to an assumed biological heredity. This transformation is a common
attribute of New Racism (Balibar; Clarke 32) in which the concept of race is detached
170 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
from the biological discipline and analysed with anthropological tools.6 This new
type of racism is also termed ‘culturalisation of race’ (Jackson 393).
The photographs create an immediate comparison between an underdeveloped
culture and a developed one, enabling racial perception to travel freely from the
photographs to the viewers.
In light of this analysis it appears that the ‘ingathering of exiles’ ethos, perceived by
Israelis as unifying, humane and liberal, actually serves as a legitimate framework for
presenting immigrants from different countries in a way that racialises their cultural
customs by replacing the country-of-origin category with the racial category. This
presentation attributes their cultural maladjustment to racial inferiority, and enables
their exclusion from the Israeli cultural and social mainstream. Such presentation of
the ‘ingathering of the exiles’ ethos deconstructs its idyllic aura and exposes its racist
manifestation.
Old vs. new was the visual code used in all the photographs to identify the Eastern
woman as alien to Israeli new society and as its perpetual ‘other’. It serves to separate
‘us’ from ‘them’. However, a renewed viewing might enable another reading.
A fresh reading of Figure 1 fractures the contradistinction Eastern/Sabra that is
present in the other photographs as well, thereby suggesting a new comprehensive
perspective. The Sabra woman and girl in Figure 1 dress identically; both wear
button-down shirts, shorts and simple, brimless cloth hats. The repetition of the same
dress code dissolves the neutrality of these women’s appearance and can be
interpreted as a cultural attribute dependent on class, location and time. Under-
mining the neutrality of the Israeli-born women in Israeli landscape has the
additional effect of undermining the otherness of the Eastern or Jewish-Arab woman.
In this respect, it metaphorically but effectively removes the Eastern bride from her
position behind the glass display, cracking open the binary construct. Moreover, the
camera’s angle enables the observer to view the group of Israeli women standing
behind the glass, granting them further visual potential status of otherness. While this
is not realised beyond the scope of the photograph’s reality, its possibility is suggested
by the visual image.7 The hierarchy of viewed and viewer, and of us and the other
originally portrayed as part of the natural world, is revealed in the photograph as a
result of an arbitrary museum arrangement.
While the museum’s practice of display shown in the photograph seeks to present
an invented phenomenon and to illustrate the existence of race, the photographic
practice undermines it. Thus, the image potentially breaks down the category it
attempts to stabilise.
The next two photographs, ‘‘The Navy at a Transit Camp’’ (Figure 4) and
‘‘Babysitter’’ (Figure 5), portray Israeli men engaged in leisure activities, and were
taken in Israel around 1950. Having shown how race is simultaneously constructed
and undermined in Figure 1, I will use the same tools in the next two photographs.
Positioning the photographs side by side evokes the category of race in the first
photograph, and then empties this category of its content in the second. In this case,
as well, the analysis of the two photographs will regard them as a part of their
Journal of Intercultural Studies 171
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
contemporary visual field, illustrated in Figures 6�8. These photographs exemplify
the prevalent mode of representation of the Jewish Yemenite immigrants � a
subgroup of the ‘Eastern’ category formerly used, and the way they were perceived by
Israeli establishment photographers. They were selected from hundreds of similar
images taken c.1950 by governmental institutions and were published in the local
press and in historical albums. Documenting the Yemenite Jews in an explicitly
oriental context, they are a part of comprehensive visual archives that simultaneously
constitute and formulate the Israeli visual field. Figures 4 and 5 will be analysed in
view of this visual field.
In Figure 6, a Yemenite group emerges destitute from the desert, their feet bare,
wearing gowns, their side curls flapping. Having traversed the desert on foot, they are
Figure 4 Beno Rothenberg. ‘‘The Navy at a Transit Camp’’, 1950, Israel Today and
Yesterday, Israel, 1965.
Figure 5 Rudi Weissenstein. ‘‘Babysitter’’, 1949, Photo Prior, Israel, 2002.
172 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
linked by Jewish-biblical tradition to the Israelites who walked the desert for 40 years
until arriving in Israel. This visual parallel is no coincidence.
The comparison of Yemenite Jews and the biblical Israelites emerges often enough
in the writings of Zionist leaders, regarding the preservation of Jewish religious
customs and the Hebrew language. This analogy served Zionist leadership in its claim
that the nineteenth-century Jews are descended from the biblical Jews exiled to
Babylon. Thus, argued the Zionists, the Jews’ claim on the land of Palestine�Eretz
Yisrael is in fact the Jewish people’s right of return.
However, the Eastern Jews’ preservation of their own heritage, shown to the
outside world as a political advantage and a historical justification for the founding of
the State of Israel, actually backfired and brought about their symbolic and actual
exclusion as ‘others’ within the country. The state wished to reject anything that
could be taken as old or traditional Eastern, and idolised the new, the modern, the
Western.
Figure 7, appearing in the same album as the previous photograph, shows a man
identified as Yemenite by his beard and headdress. He kisses the ground of the Holy
Land in an act of messianic longing and religious fervour. The iconographic parallel
between Yemenite Jews and biblical Israelites, described earlier, is grounds to interpret
this act of kissing as an authentic expression of the Yemenite’s sincere longing for the
earth his forefathers left 3,000 years ago.
Figure 8 shows a small child standing alone at the edge of a wooden walk, a tent
encampment in the background. Such transit camps were erected as temporary
housing in the 1950s for the Jewish immigrants to Israel from various countries
whom the State of Israel was not yet ready to absorb. The child is identified as
Yemenite by his skin colour and the cap on his head. In view of the rain puddles on
both sides of the walk, his short, thin pants as well as his dirty legs and face are shown
as evidence of neglecting parents who do not provide for his most basic needs, such
as warm clothing and personal hygiene. This photograph is an instance of generic
Figure 6 Unknown photographer. No name, Album Ha’olim [Immigrants Album], Israel,
around 1950.
Journal of Intercultural Studies 173
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
representation of the Yemenite ‘transit camp’ children who habitually appear dirty
and neglected, and are shown in contrast to the modern Western values of education
and hygiene. Here too, as in Figure 3(b), the hygiene designator serves to present the
Figure 7 Unknown photographer. No name, Album Ha’olim [Immigrants Album], Israel,
around 1950.
Figure 8 Unknown photographer. No name, 1950, Those Were the Days: Israel, the Early
Years, Israel, 1997.
174 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
‘otherness’ of the photographed and to erect a separation between ‘them’ and ‘us’ �the viewers.
These photographs define visual codes or representation for groups and
individuals regardless of the limits of time and space present in their everyday lives.
They conduct an overt or covert dialogue with Figures 4 and 5 on which I shall focus
now. In Figure 4, ‘‘The Navy at a Transit Camp’’, a uniformed man is playing the
accordion while looking at another man. The second man is identified as a Yemenite
by his dark hair and skin, his side curls, the hat he wears and the dented tin box that
rests on his knees, over which he bends. Another Yemenite man sits next to him,
clapping in time with the music. This photograph was taken in a transit camp tent
during a visit by Israeli navy men, and was first published in the Israel army journal
Bamahane in 1950. At first glance, the theme seems to be music. It is displayed as a
unifying, universal language, connecting people from different cultures. The
immigrant and the soldier playing music together are a visual expression of the
institutional melting-pot ideal, portraying it as possible and realistic. However, a
more profound examination of the photograph renders the institutional melting-pot
model a system that simultaneously creates and denies differences.
The gaze, interrupted in Figure 1 by the glass display, is directly present here,
illustrating the otherness of the Yemenite man in the eyes of his observer. The
uniformed soldier on the right sits rigidly as he plays his accordion. His posture is
frozen, his body bulky and he seems out of place and context. He gazes down at the
Yemenite man, who is depicted drumming on a dilapidated tin box. The uniform
identifies the soldier with the Israeli establishment, and his accordion links him to the
Hora folk dance tradition of eastern European Jews. These two entities � the Israeli
establishment and the eastern European Jews � merge in the image of the accordion-
playing soldier and are embodied in his character, suggesting that any attempt to
identify the Israeli establishment with non-Europeans is a contradiction in terms.8
Compared to the soldier’s stiff posture, the Yemenite Jew’s physical gestures betray his
enthusiasm. His fingers and arms, caught in mid air, his furrowed brow and gaping
mouth render his face passionate and wild. The photograph, portraying the Yemenite
as actually living the music and not merely playing it, authenticates his character and
preserves it as an archetype of itself. It becomes an unrealistic exhibit that is, however,
far more convincing than reality itself (Fusco 25). It proposes that despite the
distance from their land of origin and the extreme poverty at the transit camps, the
Yemenites’ musical drive has not been extinguished, suggesting that music flows in
Yemenite veins. Opposite him and in direct contrast, the accordion-playing soldier is
depicted as a man of musical skill. His German-made accordion is contrasted with
the tin box: the former is a modern musical instrument which requires technical
know-how and musical training; the latter is makeshift and common. The stark
contrast between the instruments is a visual expression of the perception that links
racial superiority to technological achievement and perpetuates the image of the
Yemenite as savage and the eastern European as cultured. Hiding behind musical
instruments and physical gestures in the photograph, this perception translates the
Journal of Intercultural Studies 175
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
customs of the European and Yemenite men to natural tendencies, replacing the
categories of origin and class with the category of race.
The presentation of the Yemenite Jew as a perpetual immigrant alongside that of
the east-European Jew as a ‘long-timer’ or Sabra is not in line with history: in actual
fact, most Yemenite-Jewish immigrants arrived between 1949 and the 1950s, while the
majority of east-European Jews migrated later (Sicron Demography 60). That given,
presenting the Yemenite Jews as perpetual immigrants in establishment photographs
seems to express their symbolic rather than actual otherness in Israeli culture. In this
context I would like to relate to the following photograph, with which I conclude my
discussion of race representations in the 1950s.
The Yemenite man, depicted as the negative image of the white European in ‘‘The
Navy at a Transit Camp’’, appears alone in ‘‘Babysitter’’. Here, sporting a suit and a
beret, he stands in a sunny Tel Aviv street, leaning on a stroller that bears a sleeping
baby wrapped in a white blanket. He holds an edition of Davar, the newspaper
identified with Mapai, the ruling party in Israel at the time. The photograph was
taken in 1949, and published in a historical photography album in 2002. Absent here
is the observing and defining gaze, present in the two previous photographs. Despite
its apparent absence, the gaze may be identified in the figure of the Yemenite who
exhibits whiteness, the manifestation of European culture, despite his dark skin, by
way of imitation and assimilation. Whiteness is the clear reference point of this
photograph, manifest in the paved urban surroundings, the newspaper, the modern
stroller and the man’s suit. The image of the Yemenite as a city dweller leisurely
reading a newspaper undermines his representation as the primitive outsider � the
prevalent representation at the time, as I have shown in Figures 6�8. Unlike the other
photographs taken in the 1950s, I found no trace of this one in the newspapers and
albums published around the time it was taken, but only in an album of 2002 �although other photographs by Rudi Weissenstein appeared in establishment
publications in the 1950s.
In the context of existing photography archives, this Yemenite man has apparently
been cultured or assimilated into the dominant culture. He has shed his desert dust,
sheared his side locks, traded his long garment and scarves for a suit, and has now
begun to show an interest in local current events. The visual field in which Yemenite
Jews were imagined by the east-European Jewish hegemony never included the
reading of a Hebrew newspaper. Depicting Yemenite immigrants as simple
uneducated people ignores the fact that the real preservers of the Hebrew tongue
were the Yemenite Jews, who studied Hebrew as a part of their religious practice. The
figure of the Yemenite man in the photograph also seeks to disclaim the perception
that religisises Yemenite Jews, viewing their affinity towards Israel as a strictly
religious one motivated by a longing for messianic redemption (Shenhav). Rather
than reading a prayer book, this Yemenite man is reading Davar, a publication of
markedly European character. Reading this particular newspaper in this specific
context establishes the Yemenite man as a political and not merely a religious subject,
and may be interpreted as a claim for political partnership which could jeopardise
176 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
European hegemony in the Israeli political sphere. This new relationship between a
Yemenite man and the ruling class newspaper undermines the east-European Jews’
natural attitude toward Israeli ruling authority, as depicted in the figure of the
accordion-playing soldier in Figure 4.
This new Yemenite man explicitly flirts with urban Tel Aviv culture, identified with
middle- and upper-class European Jews and Sabras. His ability to shed his physical
cultural attributes and adopt different features proves the unreliability and weakness
of external racial markings in the previous photographs, thus undermining the
racialising perception they represent. The Yemenite man in Figure 5 is marked as
someone who has seemingly successfully bridged the gap between the culture of the
establishment and his own Yemenite identity, portrayed as advanced and liberated.
However, his assimilation into Western culture is of course exposed as superficial,
incomplete and impossible. Despite his resemblance of the European Israeli, the
colour of his skin and his beard betray his origins, creating a kind of racial
transvestitism that demonstrates the black’s ability to perform the white (Fusco 22).
Presenting the Yemenite as a European also interprets the whiteness category as fluid
and given to change, unlike its stable and essentialist presentation in Figure 4. The
title of this photograph, ‘‘Babysitter’’, introduces a streak of humour or irony because
of the gap between the term ‘babysitter’ borrowed from contemporary Western
culture and identified in gender and age-group with adolescent girls, and the adult
Yemenite man. The title of the photograph indicates that in spite of its late
publication, the editors of the album still found it difficult to present the Yemenite as
belonging to their own society, and could not disregard the sense of camouflage in the
figure of the Yemenite Jew as a modern Israeli.
Despite the thematic and chronological resemblance between Figures 4 and 5, they
present two contradictory practices of racial marking. The figures’ cultural attributes
presented as stable racial markings in ‘‘The Navy at a Transit Camp’’ are mocked by
the Yemenite’s figure in ‘‘Babysitter’’, making it impossible to differentiate human
races on the basis of cultural markings, and undermining the correlation between
culture and nature.
Racialisation in Contemporary Photography
The final and most contemporary photograph I discuss in this paper was published in
Israel’s leading newspapers in 2007. It provides a recent example of the continued use
of visual racialising practices, echoing visual formations from the 1950s. In Figure 9,
accompanying a patriotic article about Israel on its 59th Independence Day, the
Israeli melting-pot ideal is portrayed once again.
A photograph of this type emphasises the character of Israel as a state of constant
immigration, and shows that although photography might not be as biased as it was
in the past, it still serves hegemony and does not present a critical stance vis-a-vis the
old establishment ethos, as contemporary scholars argue (Perez 8�11).
Journal of Intercultural Studies 177
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
In this instance it is the figures of young children who represent the recent
immigration waves from Ethiopia and from the former Soviet Union. These
constitute the latest mass immigrations to Israel as the present paper is being
written. The immigrants from Ethiopia are considered ‘Eastern’, Mizrahi, in the Israeli
context. In their dark pigmentation, lean body type, traditional ways and attire
(which includes kaftans and colourful scarves), their representation is reminiscent of
the Yemenite Jews of the 1950s, in spite of the nearly 40-year gap between these
immigrations.
The last major immigration wave from Ethiopia to Israel, known as Operation
Solomon, began in 1990, and included 50,000 Jewish Ethiopian immigrants (Sicron
Demography 116). Previously, in 1984�85, about 8,000 Ethiopian Jews had
immigrated to Israel. To this day, the cultural and visual characteristics of the
Ethiopian immigrants get in the way of their integration in every aspect of Israeli
society � dwelling, livelihood, health, education and rampant general discrimination
against them. Unlike the Ethiopian Jews, immigrants from the former Soviet Union
are identified with the Ashkenazi group for their light skin, eyes and hair colours, and
the entire range of their cultural customs, considered secular and modern.9
The latest immigration wave from the former Soviet Union took place between
1990 and 1995 and included some 600,000 immigrants (Sicron ‘‘Demography of the
Waves’’ 14). In Israeli parlance immigrants from the entire ‘Eastern bloc’ formerly
constituting the USSR are referred to as ‘Russians’ because of their language and
because Israelis are used to making no distinction between Russia and the Soviet
Union.
In spite of the initial impression left by the photograph depicting ‘the ingathering
of the exiles’ from 2007, critical observation enables us to see beyond the seemingly
unifying motivation displayed on the surface of the photograph. Once again it will
reveal the racialising practices concealed in the minute differences between the two
children � manifested in their height, the direction of their gazes, the manner in
which they hold the flag and the unilateral hug. The title, ‘‘Small Country, Big
Figure 9 Danny Salomon. ‘‘Small Country, Big Playground’’, Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper,
23 March 2007.
178 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
Playground’’, contradicts the racist message emerging from the visual analysis, by
comparing the small State of Israel to a playground where children from different
cultures can meet, free of differences or hierarchy.
The height difference between the boy from the former Soviet Union and the
Ethiopian girl, as well as the white boy’s upward gaze and the dark-skinned girl’s
downward gaze, reveal that in the Israeli context, the outcome of the game insinuated
by the photograph’s title is fixed. While the downward gaze of the Ethiopian girl may
be attributed to childish shyness stemming from a sense of estrangement, the boy’s
gaze lifted towards the horizon echoes the figure of the Sabra pioneer in the collective
Israeli consciousness, granting him a sense of belonging and ownership. The Hebrew
pioneer, who, in the local mythology, is known to be, at the very most, a generation
away from his/her Russian or east-European roots, formulated the state’s cultural
ideals to suit himself, thus allowing the new Russian immigrant to appear at home in
the existing photographic presentation schemes. The boy’s belonging to the Israeli
landscape vs. the Ethiopian girl’s estrangement are also emphasised by the embrace �the boy lays his hand on the girl’s shoulder in what can be viewed as a patronising
hold which she does not reciprocate.
This mode of representation diverges from the factual framework, since, as already
mentioned, most of the Ethiopian immigration waves arrived before or parallel to the
great immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. It bears witness to the
fact that, in the Israeli field of vision, the dark-skinned Jew originating from Africa
and Asia � embodied here by the Ethiopian girl and in previous cases by the Yemenite
figures � is never granted the same status of belonging as the light-skinned Russian or
European Jew, indirect descendants of the founders of the state.
It is worth noting in this context that, while in the everyday global hierarchy of
whiteness, Russians are considered inferior to Europeans, Israeli race politics diverges
from this rule.10 The fact that the state’s founding generation originated from Eastern
Europe and Russia imbues immigrants from these countries with a measure of
respectability, as opposed to other countries.
The manner in which the children hold the flag also alludes to the same gap
between the immigrants. While the girl holds the bottom edge of the flag almost
without touching it, pulling it downwards, the boy is holding its upper end and is
pulling it upwards. Holding opposite ends of the flag can be metaphorically
interpreted as the relationship between the groups they represent and the State of
Israel, represented by the flag. Ultimately, despite the physical closeness between
the children on the backdrop of a wide lawn and matching dress in national
colours, the manner in which the photographer chose to place them reveals yet
again the fact that in the Israeli landscape, a dark-skinned, non-European figure
(here of Ethiopian origin) will always remain on the outer edges of the State of
Israel, irrespective of the degree to which s/he is integrated into its society. The
light-haired Russian boy, on the other hand, fits the local Israeli image of the
Sabra from the moment he lands here.
Journal of Intercultural Studies 179
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
Conclusion
By examining several examples of documentary photography, I have attempted to
demonstrate some of the visual forms by which racial structure is organised,
displayed and maintained over time in Israeli photography. These photographs
have documented Eastern culture as ‘treasures of the past’ and Eastern persons as
primitives who did not update their customs upon arriving in the modern State
of Israel, presenting the Mizrahi Jews as an obstacle to the Zionist revival project.
This was done time and again although � officially � Israeli establishment
encouraged the immigration of all Jews and saw this as its top priority, especially
in the 1950s and 1960s. Immigrants were then perceived as reinforcement, a
unifying contribution to the young, evolving Israeli society (Sicron Demography
116).
A racialising presentation of Yemenites, Ethiopians or any other Eastern Jews in
photographs enables their construction as others, and as marginal, an overt
contradiction to the national discourse of inclusion. Their stereotypical presentation
in some nostalgic context as an antithesis of the new Israeli serves to ostracise them
from the mainstream of society and maintain the symbolic borders by which Israeli
culture defines its identity. The ability to ‘see race’ appears to be a daily practice at
which we as Israelis are well adept, even if we deny it. The act of seeing in itself �usually taken to be a natural instinct � has proven to be an administered, constructed
skill. The history of seeing in general, and seeing race in particular, is closely tied to
cultural and sociological practices of presentation and viewing (Mitchell 166). These
operate, among other means, by the visual logic of race as a complex and broad
configuration that refuses to be encased in a narrow, racist statement.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of the photographers and the holders of the rights to the
photographs for permitting me to use the photographs which appear in this paper.
Despite my great efforts, I was not successful in locating holders of the rights for some
of the photographs and I beg their pardon.
Notes
[1] Among these researchers are Yehouda Shenhav, who observed that the state manufactures
contradictory patterns of citizenship and ethnicity, simultaneously containing and excluding
the Eastern Jews from the Israeli collective, and Ella Shohat, who analysed the relationships
between ethnic groups in Israel based on post-colonial theory and claimed that by seeking to
present a uniform and Western Sabra (native Israeli) identity, the Zionist movement engaged
in double oppression: first, of the Palestinians, and second, of Eastern Jews, by effacing
different identities and cultural characteristics.
[2] Even if ‘race’ did appear in the title of the exhibition, the works of art as well as their
accompanying text did not touch upon the deciphering of racist visual codes in Israeli
society.
180 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
[3] For more information on the immigration waves, including numbers and dates
in English, see the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s website: http://www.
studentsolim.gov.il/Moia_en/AboutIsrael/AliyaList.html
[4] In her essay ‘‘Beyond Boundaries, Within Borders’’ Andy Grundberg argues that since its
early days, photography in Palestine has been associated with the imperialist motivation of
European pilgrims and travellers. In spite of changes in the content and technique of
photography, transforming it from a tourist medium to a propaganda tool serving the
various Zionist institutions, one can detect the orientalist gaze at the indigenous � obvious in
nineteenth-century photos � in Israeli photographers’ views of Eastern Jews and Palestinian
citizens of Israel to this day (Grundberg 2�17).
[5] Jackson criticises the argument that the category of race is a social and cultural construct and
thus, it does not have to be studied as a distinct phenomenon. He maintains that race and
racialism still exist and are both concealed in political and social fields and affect them.
[6] New Racism is a new manifestation of traditional and familiar racism, which disguises the
exclusion of certain groups while employing historical and anthropological claims. It is
assimilated in discourse and visual representations while organising itself around symbols of
otherness, such as names, skin colour or cultural and religious customs. The ruling motif in
this type of racism is not biological heredity, but rather the rigidity of cultural gaps. This type
of racism focuses on the damage incurred by the diffusion of boundaries between these
groups and the incompatibility between different cultures and lifestyles. Balibar maintained
that ‘new racism’ succeeds in bypassing biological and genetic naturalism, proving that
culture may also function as nature does. Clark pointed out that despite attempts to
renounce the division into races, the new racism also conceals biological markers and distinct
inborn tendencies at its basis (32).
[7] The ability to release a photograph from its initial meaning, undermining it and using it to
create new meaning, is based on Ariella Azoulay’s perception of the photographic document
(in Azoulay).
[8] This link, identified by Roland Barthes in Mythologies as mythical speech is created through
the dialogue between the associative world outside the photographic frame and the
photograph itself (59�109). Similarly, a link is established here between the Israeli
establishment and eastern European Jewish culture.
[9] In this matter, distinction should be made between the men and the women immigrants
from the former USSR whose acceptance in Israeli society was not at all self-evident (Lemish
333�49).
[10] For a discussion of whiteness and of hegemonic whiteness in recent years, see Dyer.
Works Cited
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Balibar, Etienne ‘‘Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?’’ Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Ed. Etienne
Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1991. 17�28.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Clarke, Simon. Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Dyer, Richard. ‘‘On the Matter of Whiteness.’’ Only Skin Deep: Changing Vision of the American Self.
Ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. New York: International Center of Photography, 2003.
301�11.
Fusco, Coco. ‘‘Racial Time Racial Marks Racial Metaphors.’’ Only Skin Deep: Changing Vision of the
American Self. Ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. New York: International Center of
Photography, 2003. 13�50.
Journal of Intercultural Studies 181
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14
Grundberg, Andy. ‘‘Beyond Boundaries, Within Borders.’’ Dateline: Israel: New Photography and
Video Art. Ed. Susan Goodman. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
2�17.
Guillaumin, Colette. Racism Sexism, Power and Ideology. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Hardimon, Michael O. ‘‘The Ordinary Concept of Race.’’ Journal of Philosophy C.9 (2003): 437�55.
Hart, Mitchell. ‘‘Picturing Jews: Iconography and Racial Science.’’ Values Interest and Identity: Jews
and Politics in a Changing World. Ed. Peter Y. Medding. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995. 159�69.
Hirsh, Dafna. ‘‘We’re Spreading Here Culture: Hygiene Education of the Jewish Population in
Palestine During the British Mandate.’’ Diss. Tel Aviv University, 2000.
Jackson, John L. ‘‘A Little Black Magic.’’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 104.3 (2005): 393�402.
Knowles, Caroline. ‘‘Seeing Race through the Lens.’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 29.3 (2006): 512�29.
Lemish, Dafna. ‘‘The Whore and the Other: Israeli Images of Female Immigrants from the Former
USSR.’’ Gender and Society 14.2 (2000): 333�49.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews. London and
New York: Routledge, 2000.
****. ‘‘The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index.’’ Only Skin Deep:
Changing Vision of the American Self. Ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. New York:
International Center of Photography, 2003. 111�26.
Mitchell, W. J. T. ‘‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture.’’ Journal of Visual Culture 1.2
(2002): 165�81.
Nizri, Yigal, ed. Eastern Appearance/Mother Tongue. Tel Aviv: Babel, 2004 (in Hebrew).
Perez, Nissan. ‘‘Through History of Photography in Israel.’’ Time Frame: A Hundred Years of
Photography in Israel. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2000. 8�11 (in Hebrew).
Rogoff, Irit. Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 2000.
Rosler, Martha. ‘‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography).’’ Rosler Martha,
Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975�2001. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
151�206.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 2000 (in Hebrew).
Shenhav, Yehouda. The Arab-Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Shenhav, Yehouda, and Yossi Yona, eds., Racism in Israel. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: The Van Leer
Jerusalem Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2008 (in Hebrew).
Shohat, Ella. Forbidden Reminiscences: A Collection of Essays. Tel Aviv: Bimat Kedem Lesafrut, 2001
(in Hebrew).
Sicron, Moshe. ‘‘Demography of the Waves of Immigration.’’ Profile of an Immigration Wave: The
Absorption Process of Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, 1990�1995. Ed. Moshe Sicron
and Elazar Leshem. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1998. 13�40.
****. Demography: Israel’s Population-Characteristics and Trends. Jerusalem: Carmel, 2004 (in
Hebrew).
Winant, Howard. Racial Condition: Politics, Theory, Comparisons. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
****. ‘‘The Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race.’’ Only Skin Deep: Changing Vision of the
American Self. Ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. New York: International Center of
Photography, 2003. 51�61.
182 N. Hazan
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Uni
vers
ity o
f T
exas
Lib
rari
es]
at 1
5:51
25
Nov
embe
r 20
14